Effects of pathogen dependency in a multi-pathogen infectious disease system including population level heterogeneity – a simulation study

Background Increased computational resources have made individual based models popular for modelling epidemics. They have the advantage of incorporating heterogeneous features, including realistic population structures (like e.g. households). Existing stochastic simulation studies of epidemics, however, have been developed mainly for incorporating single pathogen scenarios although the effect of different pathogens might directly or indirectly (e.g. via contact reductions) effect the spread of each pathogen. The goal of this work was to simulate a stochastic agent based system incorporating the effect of multiple pathogens, accounting for the household based transmission process and the dependency among pathogens. Methods With the help of simulations from such a system, we observed the behaviour of the epidemics in different scenarios. The scenarios included different household size distributions, dependency versus independency of pathogens, and also the degree of dependency expressed through household isolation during symptomatic phase of individuals. Generalized additive models were used to model the association between the epidemiological parameters of interest on the variation in the parameter values from the simulation data. All the simulations and statistical analyses were performed using R 3.4.0. Results We demonstrated the importance of considering pathogen dependency using two pathogens, and showing the difference when considered independent versus dependent. Additionally for the general scenario with more pathogens, the assumption of dependency among pathogens and the household size distribution in the population cohort was found to be effective in containing the epidemic process. Additionally, populations with larger household sizes reached the epidemic peak faster than societies with smaller household sizes but dependencies among pathogens did not affect this outcome significantly. Larger households had more infections in all population cohort examples considered in our simulations. Increase in household isolation coefficient for pathogen dependency also could control the epidemic process. Conclusion Presence of multiple pathogens and their interaction can impact the behaviour of an epidemic across cohorts with different household size distributions. Future household cohort studies identifying multiple pathogens will provide useful data to verify the interaction processes in such an infectious disease system. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12976-017-0072-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.